The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Sixth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “Are there any bogs inside the fenced-off part of Fylingdales, the part that’s closed to the public?”

  Elphi groaned softly, swinging his head. “Ach, Woof Howe did hate it so, skulking in that dreary place. But still, the flowers would have pleased him.”

  “Weren’t there some rare plants found recently inside the fence, because the sheep haven’t been able to graze them down in there?”

  “Now, that’s true,” Elphi mused. “They wouldn’t disturb the place where the bog rosemary grows. I’ve heard them going on about the bog rosemary and the marsh andromedas over around May Moss.” He glanced at the sun. “Well, I’m obliged to you, my dear. And now we’d best be off. Time’s getting on. And I want you to get out your map, and put on your rain shawl now.”

  “My what?”

  “The green hooded thing you were wearing over your other clothes when I found you.”

  “Oh, the poncho.” She dug this out, heaved and hoisted the pack back on and belted it, then managed to haul the poncho on and down over pack and all despite the whipping of the wind, and to snap the sides together. All this took time, and Elphi was fidgeting before she finished. She faced him, back to the wind. “Since I helped solve your problem, how about helping me with mine?”

  “And what’s that?”

  “I want to remember all this, and come back and see you again.”

  This sent Elphi off into a great fit of moaning and head-swinging. Abruptly he stopped and stood, rigidly upright. “Would you force me to lie to you? What you ask cannot be given, I’ve told you why.”

  “I swear I wouldn’t tell anybody!” But when this set off another groaning fit Jenny gave up. “All right. Forget it. Where is it you’re taking me?”

  Elphi sank to all fours, trembling a little, but when he spoke his voice sounded ordinary. “To the track across Great Hograh, where we met. Just over there, do you see? The line of cairns?” And sure enough, there on the horizon was a row of tiny cones. “You walk before me now, straight as you can, till you strike the path.”

  Jenny, map in hand and frustration in heart, obediently started to climb toward the ridge, lifting her boots high and clear of the snow-dusted heather. The wind was now at her back. Where a sheep-track went the right way she followed it until it wandered off-course, then cast about for another; and in this way she climbed at last onto the narrow path. She stopped to catch her breath and admire the view, then headed east, toward the Youth Hostel at Westerdale Hall, with the sun behind her.

  For a couple of miles after that Jenny thought of nothing at all except the strange beauty of the scenery, her general soreness and tiredness, and the hot, bad dinner she would get in Westerdale. Then, with a slight start, she wondered when the fog had cleared, and why she hadn’t noticed. She pulled off the flapping poncho—dry already!—rolled it up, reached behind to stuff it under the pack flap, then retrieved her map in its clear plastic cover from between her knees and consulted it. If that slope directly across the dale was Kempswithen, then she must be about here, and so would strike the road into Westerdale quite soon. She would be at the hostel in, oh, maybe an hour, and have a hot bath—hot wash, anyway, the hostel probably wouldn’t have such a thing as a bathtub, they hardly ever did—and the biggest dinner she could buy.

  * * *

  “This is our off-season. You’re in luck,” said the hostel warden. “We were expecting you yesterday. In summer there wouldn’t have been a bed in the place, but we’re not fully booked tonight so not to worry. Will you be wanting supper?”

  “I booked for the fifth,” said Jenny a bit severely. “I’m quite sure, because the fifth is my sister’s birthday.”

  “Right. But the fifth was yesterday; this is the sixth.” He put his square finger on a wall calendar hanging behind him. “Thursday, April the sixth. All right?”

  “It’s Wednesday the fifth,” said Jenny patiently, wondering how this obvious flake had convinced the Youth Hostel Association to hire him for a position of responsibility. She held out her wrist so he could read the day and date.

  He glanced at the watch. “As a matter of fact it says Thursday the sixth. But it’s quite all right, you’ll get a bed. Now what about supper, yes or no? There’s people waiting to sign in.”

  Jenny stared at the little squares on the face of her watch and felt her own face begin to burn. “Sorry, I guess I made a mistake. Ah—yes, please, I definitely do want supper.” A couple of teenage boys, waiting in the queue behind her, were looking at her strangely; she fumbled out of her boots, slung them into the bootrack, hoisted up her pack, and with all the dignity she could summon up proceeded toward the dormitory she’d been assigned to.

  Safe in the empty dorm she picked a bed and sat on it, dumping her pack on the floor beside her. “I left Cambridge on the third,” she said aloud. “I stayed two nights in York. I got on the Middlesbrough train this morning, changed there for Whitby, got off at Kildale, and walked over the tops to Westerdale. How and where in tarnation did I manage to lose a day?”

  On impulse she got out her seat ticket for the Inter-City train. The seat had been booked for the third. The conductor had looked at and punched the ticket. Nobody else had tried to sit in the same seat. There could be no reasonable likelihood of a mistake about the day.

  Yet her watch, which two days ago had said Monday, April 3, now said Thursday, April 6. Where could the missing day have gone?

  But there was no one to tell her, and the room was cold. Jenny came back to the present: she needed hot water, food, clean socks, her slippers, and (for later) several more blankets on her bed. She wrestled her pack around, opened it, and pulled out her towel and soap box; but her spare pair of boot socks was no longer clean. In fact, it had obviously been worn hard. Both socks were foot-shaped, stuck full of little twiglets of heather, and just slightly damp.

  The prickly bits of heather made Jenny realize that the socks she was wearing were prickly as well. She stuck a finger down inside the prickliest sock to work the bits of heather loose, giving this small practical problem all her attention so as to hold panic at bay.

  The prickle in her right sock was not heather, but a small piece of paper folded up tight. Hands shaking, Jenny opened the scrap of paper and spread it flat on her thigh. It was a Lipton teabag wrapper, scribbled over with a pen on the non-printed side, in her own handwriting. The scribble said:

  hob called ELFY (?)—caught me in fog, made me come home with him—disguised as sheep—lives in hole with 6 others—hobs are aliens—he’ll make me forget but TRY TO REMEMBER—Danby High Moor?/Bransdale?/ Farndale?—KEEP TRYING, DON’T GIVE UP!!!

  These words, obviously penned in frantic haste, meant nothing whatever to Jenny. What was a hob? Yet she had written this herself, no question.

  Her mind did a slow cartwheel. The sixth of April. Thursday, not Wednesday.

  Jenny folded up the scrap of paper and stowed it carefully in her wallet. Methodically then she went through the pack. The emergency food packet had gone, vanished. So had the flashlight, and the candles. The spare shirt and underwear that ought to have been fresh were not. Her little aluminum mess kit pot, carefully soaped for easy cleaning through so many years of camping trips, had been blackened with smoke on the bottom.

  Something inexplicable had happened and Jenny had forgotten what it was—been made to forget, apparently; and to judge by this message from out of the lost day she had considered it well worth remembering.

  All right then, she decided, hunched aching and grubby on a hard bed in that cold, empty room, the thing to do was to follow instructions and not give up. Trust her own judgment. Keep faith with herself, even if it took years.

  * * *

  It did take years, but Jenny never gave up. She returned as often to the North York Moors National Park as summers, semester breaks, and sabbaticals permitted, coming to know Danby High Moor, and Bransdale and Farndale, and their moors, as well as a foreign visitor could possibly know them in every season; and each visit
made her love that rugged country better. In time she became a regular guest at a farm in Danby Dale that did bed-and-breakfast for people on holiday, and never again needed to sleep in Westerdale Hall.

  The wish to unriddle the mystery of the missing April 5 retained its strength and importance without, luckily, becoming obsessive, and this fact confirmed Jenny’s instinctive sense that when she had scribbled that note to herself she had been afraid only of forgetting, not of the thing to be forgotten. She wanted the lost memories back, not in order to confront and exorcise them, but to repossess something of value that rightfully belonged to her.

  But Elphi’s powers of suggestion were exceptional. Try as she might, Jenny could not recapture what had happened. Diligent research did uncover a great deal of information about hobs (including the correct spelling of Elphi’s name, for he had been famous in his day). And Jenny also made it her business to learn what she could about people who believed themselves to have been captured and examined by aliens (for instance, they are drawn back again and again to the scene of the close encounter). Many of these people had clearly been traumatized, and were afterwards tormented by their inability to remember what had happened to them. Following their example, in case it might help, Jenny eventually sat through a few sessions with a hypnotist; but whether because her participation was halfhearted or because Elphi’s skills were of a superior sort, she could remember nothing.

  None of Jenny’s efforts, in fact, produced the results she actively desired and sought. They did have the wholly unlooked-for result of finding her a husband, and a new and better home.

  Frank Flintoft at forty-eight had flyaway white hair and a farmer’s stumping gait, but also wide-awake blue eyes in a curiously innocent face. His parents were very old friends of John and Rita Dowson, whose farm in Danby Dale had become Jenny’s hob-hunting base in Yorkshire. Frank had grown up on his family’s farm in Westerdale, gone off to Cambridge on a scholarship, then returned to take a lease on a place near Swainby, just inside the Park boundary, and settle down to breeding blackface sheep.

  The Dowsons had spoken of this person to Jenny with a mixture of admiration and dubiety. A local boy that went away to University rarely came back. Frank had come back—but with Ideas, and also with a young bride who had left for London before the first year was out; and the Dowsons frowned upon divorce. Frank would use no chemicals, not even to spray his bracken, which put John Dowson’s back up. For another thing, he went in for amateur archeology—with the blessing of the County Archeologists for half the North Riding—and was known to the Archeology Departments at the Universities of York and Leeds. And with it all, more often than not Frank’s Swaledale gimmer lambs took Best of Breed at the annual Danby Show.

  This paragon and Jenny were introduced on one of her summer junkets. The two hit it off immediately, saw a lot of each other whenever Jenny was in Yorkshire, but were not quick to marry. Frank had first to convince himself that Jenny truly loved the moor country for its own sake, and could be trusted not to leave it, before he was prepared to risk a second marriage; but Jenny, to her own surprise, felt wholly willing to exchange her old life for Frank, a Yorkshire sheep farm at the moors’ edge, with a two hundred-year-old stone farmhouse, and parttime teaching at York University.

  Not until six months after the wedding did Jenny tell her husband about the hob named Elphi. They had finished their evening meal and were sitting at the kitchen table before the electric fire, and at a certain point in the bizarre narrative Frank put his thick hand over hers. “I’ve heard of Elphi myself,” he said thoughtfully when she had finished. “Well, and so that’s what really brought you back here, year after year … you’ve still got the note you wrote yourself, I expect.” Jenny had had the teabag wrapper laminated, years before. Wordless she went to her room to fetch it, and wordless he read what she had written there.

  “Can you suggest an explanation?” she finally asked.

  Frank shook his head. “But I know one thing. Ancient places have got lives of their own. There’s 3,500 years of human settlement on these moors, love. When I’m working on one of the ancient sites I often feel anything at all might happen up there. Almost anything,” he amended; “I’m not happy thinking of the hobs as spacemen from somewhere else—I’ve been hearing tales of Hob all my life, you know. He belongs to our own folklore. I’d prefer to find an explanation closer to home.”

  “Well anyway, then, you won’t think me barmy to go on trying to solve the mystery? It’s the one truly extraordinary thing that ever happened to me,” she added apologetically.

  Frank grinned and shook his head again. “You didn’t by any chance marry me for convenience, did you—in order to get on with the search?”

  “Not only for that,” said Jenny in relief, and hugged her tolerant and broadminded husband.

  But more years went by, and gradually she forgot to think about Elphi at all. Her quest had brought her a life which suited her so perfectly, and absorbed her so entirely, that in the end there was too little dissatisfaction left in Jenny to fuel the search for a solution to the puzzle.

  One early summer morning, five years after she had come to live with Frank, the two of them—as they frequently did—took the Land Rover and a hamper of sandwiches up to the tops, for a day of archeology and botanizing. Over a period of several months Frank had been surveying several minor Bronze Age sites between Nab Farm and Blakey Topping, just outside the southern boundary of the four-square-mile forbidden zone of the Early Warning System on Fylingdales Moor. Private land within the Park was thickly strewn with these ancient sites, mostly cairns and field systems. Many had still not been officially identified, and quite a few of the landowners were unaware of their existence. The Park Committee were only too happy to accept Frank’s skilled, and free, assistance with the mapping and recording of the less important sites, and Frank enjoyed the work. But the painstaking patience it required was more in his line than Jenny’s; she preferred to poke about in the bogland of Nab Farm and nearby May Moss.

  On this day she left Frank setting up his equipment under a gray ceiling of cloud, and hiked off briskly through a spur of afforested land to see whether the marsh andromeda had bloomed. An hour and a half later she reappeared, stumbling and panting, to drag a startled Frank away from his work, back through the narrow bit of pine plantation to the stretch of bog she had been scanning for rare plants. Something—perhaps a dog, or a trail bike—had gouged a large messy hole in the peat; and inside the hole, just visible above dark water, what looked like a hand and part of an arm had been exposed. The arm appeared to be covered with long hair.

  Frank stepped back hastily, yanking his Wellington boot out of the muck with a rude noise. “One of us had better go after the police.”

  “No,” said Jenny, still panting. “We’ve got to dig him out. Never mind why, just help me do it.” Already she was pulling her anorak over her head and rolling up her sleeves.

  There were no flies on Frank Flintoft. After one hard look at his wife he began unbuttoning his own jacket.

  Apart from a few sheep scattered across the long slopes of moor there was no one to see them delving in the bog. In twenty minutes, using a pocketknife, a plastic trowel, and their bare hands, they had exposed a small body. The body had been laid on its back in a shallow grave, not shrouded or even clothed except in the long, shaggy hair, stained a dark brown by the peaty water, that covered him completely.

  While they labored to clear the face, scooping up double handfuls of mucky peat and throwing them out of the hole, Jenny abruptly began to cry silently; and when the body lay wholly uncovered, and they had poured a canteen of water over it to wash it a little cleaner, Frank stood and gazed soberly, then put his arm around Jenny and said gently, “Elphi, I presume.”

  Jenny took no notice of the tears that continued to streak her filthy face, except to wipe her nose on her sleeve. “No, it’s another hob, called Woof Howe.” And there at the graveside she began to tell Frank the story which ha
d fallen upon her, entire and clear in every detail, as soon as their digging had revealed the corpse’s form. “I’m pretty sure he meant to bury Woof Howe in the bog over there, on the grounds of the EWS,” she finished. “The fence must have been too much for him—imagine trying to get in there carrying a body, all by yourself, no matter how strong you were.” The moor wind blew upon them, stirring the reeds around the grave; Jenny shivered and leaned against Frank.

  “Or I suppose this could be one of the other hobs, that died later on—Elphi himself, possibly.”

  “Un-uh, not Elphi,” said Jenny. She spoke in a dazed way, obviously somewhat in shock, and Frank gave her a concerned look. “I really thought the acid in the peat would decompose soft tissue fast—that’s what I told him, I’d actually read it somewhere—but I hadn’t heard then about the bog people of Ireland and Denmark, that were preserved for thousands of years in peat bogs.”

  “Ah. And so the result was just the opposite of what you intended.”

  “It looks that way, doesn’t it.” She stared down at the dead face. “I’m glad and sorry both.”

  “But mostly glad?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Well,” said Frank, “what shall we do about it then? Notify the police after all, or the Moors Centre?”

  “No.” Jenny roused herself and stood on her own feet. “We’ll just bury him again, and try to make it look like this spot had never been touched.”

  Frank started, but swallowed his objections. “Sure that’s what you want?”

  Jenny stated flatly, “Elphi wouldn’t trust me to keep his secret. I’m going to prove he was wrong. We’ll just cover Woof Howe up again, and smooth out the mud, and leave him in peace.”

  “It’s been over fifteen years, love,” Frank could not help protesting. “The other hobs could all be dead by now.”